JPod (6 page)

[HR staffer]

Kaitlin hangs up.

[Sound of phone keypad buttons being pushed.]

"Hello, Allan? It's Kaitlin Joyce calling. Sorry to call your cell number when you're away. But your cell number was on your card, and . . ."

[Allan Rothstein]

"I'm going into a meeting soon, myself, sir."

[Allan Rothstein]

"I'll be quick, then. Your HR people put me in a place called jPod. Can you please call them and have me moved to the team's character-animating pod so that. . ."

[Allan Rothstein]

"What was that noise you just made?"

[Allan Rothstein]

"No. You distincdy said something like,
uh-oh."

[Allan Rothstein]

"I know you're busy, Allan, and, like you, I want to get to work, but I . . ."

[Allan Rothstein]

"When are you back, then?"

[Allan Rothstein]

"Okay. I'm sorry to have called you on a semi-holiday."

[Allan Rothstein]

"I'll make the best of the situation until then."

[Allan Rothstein]

"Goodbye."

Kaitlin hangs up.

. . .

This is Casper Jesperson, a.k.a. the Cancer Cowboy, and I have to ask you, mister, what do you think happens to you after you die? Which is a way of asking, do you believe in something specific, or a warm cosmic glow, followed by the total extinction of your being? Do you go to church? It's hard to imagine you there, no offence, and if you went, you'd probably be thinking about life and death in the Clown Universe, that great balloon-twist in the sky.

I come from a farm community, and when I was maybe seven I went to a party at a friend's place. There was a clown there, juggling navel oranges, and while he was doing it, I went out and looked inside his car by the dog kennel, and there was McDonald's trash all over the floor, front and back, and fifty aluminum beer can empties on the floor of the passenger seat. On the dashboard was a Tom Clancy novel (that's how I turned on to him) with all of the yellow ink sun-faded out of the cover (but not the cyan or magenta), as well as the wet, pulpy stump of a cheap and recently extinguished stogie. There was other crap, too—pizza flyers, a copy of
Oui
magazine opened to a woman sitting spread-eagled, wearing a bandolier of machine gun bullets. It's kind of haunted me my whole life, that car.

So imagine you've just finished scaring kids at a birthday party—you're still in your clown makeup and you get in your car, and maybe it doesn't start right away, so you say
fuck fuck fuck
a few times, which is like a magic phrase that starts it. You pull out of the driveway in reverse, way too quickly, and once you're on the main road you floor it because you have to get to your favourite cocktail lounge to put your birthday party money on a greyhound race. But when you get there, the bar is closed because some pipes burst, and suddenly you can't place your bet, which gives you Clown Rage. You need a drink, but you're a clown, and you can't go into just any bar. Nonetheless, a bet is a bet, so you decide to drive over to the next town and put your money down there. In between the two towns, you stop the car, get out and go to the trunk, where you get your de-clowning makeup remover. Your stomach lurches because you're hungover, and you haven't eaten in a day, and there you are, scraping off the white guck with nothing around you but the sound of the wind whistling over the alfalfa stubble, and maybe a crow on a fence that's curious as to whether your paper towel is edible.

You hear a car approaching, but you pretend you're too busy to look because, from experience, you've learned that making eye contact with adults when you're in clown drag is risky. So your head is in the trunk, and you're scraping away, when without you even knowing what it is, a baseball bat held by a sixteen-year-old kid on meth clubs you on the head and you die. Where do you go from there?

Yours from Planet Earth,

The Cancer Cowboy

. . .

I poked my head up and said, "I can think of no better thing to do."

She said, "Here's what I think. Mark and
you"
—she almost spat out my name—
"Ethan,
are the same person. To read your letters, there's no difference between you, no shred of individuality." (NOTE: I deleted the passage on Kaitlin from my publicly released letter.)

"Well, Kaitlin, if you're such an individual," I shot back, "put your words where your mouth is."

"What a witty comeback. Even John Doe's letter had more edge than yours."

John Doe's head popped up: "Then I have failed. I strive for aver-ageness in everything I do."

"I have an idea," Bree offered. "If Ethan and Mark are so similar, we might as well arbitrarily assign them distinct personality traits. I know—Mark, from here on, you're to be called 'Evil Mark.'"

"Why do I have to be the evil one?"

"Because your email address is so dull—[email protected]? We really have to zap your brain with defibrillator paddles to get you up and running."

"If I'm evil, then what's Ethan?"

"Ethan is good."

"This is so 'Spy vs. Spy' arbitrary."

"Which spy did you vote for?"

"The black one."

"There you go. Evil. You are pure evil."

"Just because I didn't root for the white one?"

"It's more complex than that."

Chorus: "Mark is evil! Mark is evil!"

Kaitlin said, "This is so stupid."

I said, "Kaitlin, before you go name-calling, pony up. Send us all a letter to Ronald that says 'Kaitlin,' and only Kaitlin."

"If it gets you off my back, I'll do it."

. . .

. . .

Dirk, who's a friend of mine from Hewlett-Packard, sent me photos from his trip to Nagoya, using the Kodak Easy Share photo display system. Using its interface, I felt like I was time-travelling to 1999. I half expected a pop-up window to tell me to submit my mailing address so that they could snail-mail me a 56K floppy. And
then
I got to thinking about it . . . Kodak still
exists}
Even seeing its name makes me feel like I'm at a garage sale. I bet they stopped hiring young people in 1997.

. . .

While Kaitlin was writing her letter, my phone rang. 'Your father is acting weird around me," Mom said. "Did you tell him about Tim?"

"Of course not."

"Why is he acting so strangely, then?"

"Maybe
you're
the one acting weird, and he's just feeding it back to you."

"I just drove up the hill to make sure Tim's body was still covered up."

"And . . . ?"

"They've already backfilled the area."

"That's a relief."

"I miss him."

"Mom, not here, not now."

"Can I come see you?"

"At work?"

"Why are you so surprised?"

"Mom, you never even came to elementary school or high school. . ."

"I always thought you should have a space in the world that was entirely your own."

"I always thought you didn't care."

"Nonsense. What time should I come visit?"

'You can't. I have meetings."

"Meetings? Who are you—Darren Stevens? I'll pop by. It'll be fun."

"Mom—"

She hung up.

. . .

Dad phoned a minute later, his voice kind of distant and calling-from-a-tin-can-y.

"Dad, you sound all funny."

"I'm dying my eyebrows black, so I have to hold the receiver away from me."

"Why?"

"I'm auditioning again."

"What movie this time?"

"Something about a radioactive teddy bear that saves Halloween."

"How do black eyebrows fit in?"

"If I get the part, I get to be a father taking his kid trick-or-treating dressed as Abraham Lincoln."

"So what's up?"

"Your mother is acting weird."

"Maybe
you're
the one acting weird, and she's just feeding it back to you."

'You're not going to mention Ellen, are you?"

"No."

"She's hot, isn't she? Ellen, that is."

"Dad! Do not talk like that to me. She was too young for
me
to dance with at the Z95 noon-hour Beat Breaks in high school."

"Discussing women makes you feel weird?"

"Discussing women with my father? Yes. It does. Dad, is there anything else? I've got this meeting . . ."

"Gee. You have a job and I don't."

"Dad, let's not go there again."

"Just kidding. You couldn't get me back into an office chair for a million bucks. I should have been an actor all along."

"Dad, I really have to go."

"Hasta luego,
cubicle boy."

. . .

Ronald Darling,

I've just been transferred into a new game development pod, which is truly the pod of the corn. Part of their tribal lore is that I have to write you this degrading letter, which is so stupid, because how many times have you and I already had online sex—three hundred? They don't even think you're real, which pisses me off no end. And I know if I try to discuss our forbidden love, we'll both be mocked and shunned.

All I want to be is in a living room with the lights on low, and the battery in my laptop hot and aroused, with you and me talking smutty across the ether. Tonight I'm yours, and yours always. But Ronald, darling, next time don't let the Hamburglar into the dialogue box. He totally kills the mood. Three-ways are for tramps.

Your

McSlut, Kaitlin

Closed course
Professional driver

High-Speed CMOS Logic

Introduction to Algorithms

VHDL Made Easy!

E
³

SANFORD                                                    No. 81803

bezierkurv

chunky lover53

darksi de of aplanet

Bwoonnhilde

. . .

Meeting time:

Steve, the guy who turned Toblerone around in two years, tries to be one of the people. He's always hanging around with the cool crowd on a project, and he socializes with them off-hours, so he can say, "Hey, I'm hands-on in the trenches with my team!" of which there are now fifty-six members. As production speeds up, dozens more will pile on as senior management weighs in with all kinds of random, last-minute features. Steve is the only suit in the room and, thanks to Bree's mastery of Google, all of us know it's a $2,200 suit.

"Be
the turde!" Steve said.

Nervous titters.

"Think
like a turde."

Nervous titters.

"My friends, you
are
the turde."

Fake contemplative silence peppered with ironic gasps.

"You, over there—" Steve pointed to a world-object texture map artist named Marty Choy, who I worked with two games ago. "When you think turtle, what do you think of?"

Silence. Marty couldn't believe that he, of all people in the room, had been chosen. "Reptile . . ." he said.

"Exactly!"

"Really?"

"Yes, really. Now, you, over there—" Steve pointed to a guy who I think was in either an AI-SE or a Tools SE on hockey titles. "When you think of turtles, what do you think of?"

"Konami's arcade and console games based on the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles franchise?"

Steve looked gratified, but then a serious expression came over his face. We were all hoping that the random selection of audience members was over.

"Everybody, I must say before we go any further, that the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles characters®, including Raphael®, Michelangelo®, Leonardo®, Donatello®, and April O'Neil® are all registered trademarks of Mirage Studios, and anything we say or do is in no way based on or disparaging of this fine intellectual property."

Dead silence.

"Come on, team—let's talk turtle here. I can't take unless you give."

Someone I couldn't see on the other side of the room volunteered, "Turtle shells don't require many polygons to render. So it won't slow gameplay much."

Another voice said, "That's like Keanu Reeves's black dress/cloak thingy in
The Matrix."

A
different voice yet: "Really?"

"Computers were way slower back then. They used the black cloak to shorten render times."

"Let's get back on track," Steve said.

Kaitlin, going for broke, asked, "Steve, we're at milestone five, and you want to dump a charismatic turtle into an action-sports game? How can you wreck a third-person skateboard game like this? Who's going to play it, Teletubbies?"

Then everyone began to cluster-dump on the turtle idea. Steve remained serene through it all, then held up his hand for silence. "This is all well and good. I encourage vigorous debate and the exchange of ideas—who wouldn't? It's what democracy is based on. I like the fact that all of you are so vocal here this afternoon. But the point of this meeting is that my son Carter loves the turtle character in Sim Quest4, and if Carter likes turtles, every kid in the world is going to like turtles. So the fact is, a charismatic turtle character is going to be in the game—that's been decided at the upper levels—so today we take the first steps as a group to flesh out our turtle."

Silence.

"On a constructive front, the game has also been renamed BoardX."

Evil Mark turned purple and shot up his hand. "Why?"

"X says to the world, hip and daring—punk and funk. It tells the world we're not just some average game."

Just then there was a gentle knock on the door. What sort of chowderhead would risk management's ire by intruding in the middle of a grok? The door opened, and in walked Mom.

"Can I help you?" Steve's voice was pleasant.

"Why, yes, I'm looking for my son, Ethan." She spotted me. "Oh hi, dear."

"Mom—?"

Everybody began chanting
Ethan Ethan Ethan
and
Mama's Boy.
I'd have been legally entitled to have a stroke at that point, but I figured, high school was over a decade ago. I stood up and went over to her. How did she get through security? Why wasn't she accompanied by a guard, or wearing a laminated security pass?

Steve said, "Is everything okay, Mrs.—"

"Jarlewski. Carol Jarlewski. Yes, and thank you for asking. I was at home this morning, and I realized that I don't really know much about where Ethan works or what he does. I thought I'd see for myself. Sorry for interrupting your meeting . . ."

"Steve. Steve Lefkowitz."

They shook hands. Mom showed not a twinge of uneasiness at standing before a group of fifty-six geeks. "My! Look at all of you clever young people. What are you doing today?"

Everybody giggled, and Steve, a master of timing, said, "Carol Jarlewski, what do you think of when you think of turtles?"

"Turtles? Well, I think that turtles have to be intelligent creatures, because in evolutionary terms they go back farther than just about every other animal. They're good at surviving. And they're cute, too. Sort of cheeky. My sister and I found one in the pond back when we were kids, and it winked at me. Saucy little things."

Steve looked at all of us. "And you thought turtles weren't hip."

This was now out of my hands—not that it was ever in them.

"Everybody, let's have Carol sit in on the meeting," Steve announced. "Her outsider perspective might add something valuable to our quest." People actually clapped.

And thus Mom took her seat near Steve's podium and spent the next two hours beaming at me and offering the occasional idea, some of which were good. "Those skateboard monsters are always spray-painting everything, including the Edgemont Village Super Valu's walls, and in my opinion they all deserve a few months in jail. But why not make your turtle's shell a surface on which players spray-paint clues? The turtle can't see what's on his back, so one of his goals is to locate reflective surfaces throughout the game, while his competition is trying to wreck those surfaces."

John Doe also lobbed out an idea that stuck. He suggested that a universally appreciated buddy-type personality was that of Jeff Probst—"charismatic host of TV's still-sizzling long-running reality show
Survivor."
I'm not sure if John Doe was kidding, but everybody clapped, and suddenly Steve said, "Hey—this sounds like an idea with legs."

At the end, when I asked Mom if she wanted me to take her on a tour, she said, "That's okay, Ethan. Young Steven here is taking me."

Steve didn't even look at me. His eyes were all on Mom.

I schlumped my way back to the pod.

. . .

Random note from today's meeting:

Fresh New Lucky Charms Marshmallow Shapes . . .

. . . Masonic emblems

. . . witch-dunking stools . . . stepmothers

. . . PayPal logos

. . . anal beads.